What it takes to give good customer service

Monday

I was in the Autozone store on Bee Ridge Road in Sarasota, looking for a suitable motor oil for my old Ford, and asked the clerk, Peter, a few questions about how to make the right choice.

He walked with me out to the parking lot, lifted the car hood and eyeballed the equipment before coaching me on my alternatives.

I've come to expect excellent service at AutoZone locations nationwide. So I asked Peter if it was because of the training he received from the company. How come employees in all of your stores consistently give good service, I asked?

Sure, AutoZone trains its people, he told me, but it had more to do with pre-employment tests of recruits before they are hired. The likelihood of them giving good customer service is the top prerequisite, he said, and the test eliminates those who don't have the right personality traits.

I had a similar response from a man bagging groceries at Publix. After asking if his store carries my brand of dental floss, he stopped what he was doing, led me through the aisle and located the product.

Just as with my AutoZone experience, he told me that Publix places its emphasis on choosing employees who are more inclined to give superior customer service.

There's a good reason these companies emphasize good customer service.

"Poor customer service is what prevents customers from coming back," says Ilona Jerabek, president of Canada-based PsychTests AIM Inc. "If you manage to enrage your customers, they will make it their mission to badmouth your company with friends and family."

She said to do a Google search of "the customer from hell" to get a real-world view of what customer-service representatives have to deal with every day. (I Googled her phrase and got 138,000 hits.)

"Aside from angry rants, name-calling and some rather colorful language, customer-service reps need to have both the fortitude and the patience to deal with some very unique characters," Jerabek says. "Hiring employees with just the right personality profile can really make a difference."

She tested more than 1,400 experienced customer-service representatives and compared their traits to the rest of the test-taking population to develop a "Customer Service Profile." She found that the best customer- service employees have better communication skills, a higher level of patience and a more positive and upbeat attitude. They are more skilled at resolving conflict, self-motivated, cope better with stress and have "a much thicker skin."

Larry Face, Sarasota resident, business coach and founder of Next Level Achievement, calls the desirable traits "EQ," for emotional quotient. Its components, he says, are self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management.

You can read about business leadership tips and sign up for Face's newsletter at nextlevelachievement.com.

To learn more about personality-trait testing and take an "Emotional Intelligence Test," go to Jerabek's landing page at tinyurl.com/ 8ex5tch. The test has 146 questions, takes 45 minutes to complete and is for your personal use only.

Hiring the right employees is a learned human-resources skill. Don't rely on intuition, because your success depends upon getting it right.

Jerry Chautin is a local volunteer business counselor with Manasota SCORE, Counselors to America's Small Business. Send business questions and stories to him at jkchautin@aol.com and follow him on Twitter.com/JerryChautin.

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